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When Mike le Riche left his longtime post in the Darcys last year and struck out on his own as Fake Palms, he had one clear goal in mind for the project: make it as dirty and imperfect and far away from the pathologically ambitious and hi-fi-minded Darcys as possible.

“I wanted it to be live off the floor,” says le Riche over a beer in Kensington Market. “I wanted to do kind of the opposite of what we’d done with the Darcys, which was very clinical, where everything was to a click-track, and layering and layering and layering, and redoing things until they were perfect or the best that we could possibly do. And I just wanted to do the opposite of that. I wanted to throw that away. I wanted it to sound loose and sound like real people in a room. I want you to hear the mistakes, and hear us speed up and slow down. All my favourite records are like that.”

Le Riche’s dreams of sublime scuzz were eventually realized in Fake Palms’ artfully frazzled, eponymous debut, released in late August to much excitement within the international noise-rock underground through blazing-hot Toronto indie imprint Buzz Records.

The album’s hard-chugging, psych-spiked fizz is so caustic, in fact, that a few fans who’ve already picked up the vinyl at shows have emailed the band fretting that “I think my record is broken” because the songs are slathered in so much distortion.

This is comforting to le Riche — a fan of such lo-fi/no-budget noisesmiths as Eric’s Trip and Mount Eerie as well as the lockstep punk of Gang of Four and Wire that often exerts a (literally) driving influence over Fake Palms’ rhythm section — since there was a moment during recording where he thought Fake Palms had failed to adequately bring the fuzz in the studio.

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“It’s funny. We recorded the whole thing really, really cleanly, and the studio we recorded at had this old ’70s Neve board, which makes everything super smooth. So when we were listening to rough mixes, I was just panicking,” he laughs. “I was, like: ‘OK, this didn’t work. Let’s just throw it out and chalk it up as a bad experiment.’ But the producer, Ian Gomes, and I were just, like, ‘No, no, no. Let’s run it through a cassette four-track and see what we can do with it.’ And the hotter we made the sound, the better it started to sound.”

Le Riche has emerged from the liberating, if also briefly “terrifying” experience of ditching his frustrating, perennial third-fiddle status in the Darcys (now a duo) to exert full creative control over his own band.

The only minor hiccup is that he’s surrounded himself with such in-demand players — Hooded Fang guitarist Lane Halley, Burning Love bassist Patrick Marshall and drummer Simone TB, who regularly features in the Highest Order, Fiver, U.S. Girls and numerous other outfits — that scheduling a show, let alone a tour, is a logistical horror. Case in point: Constantines drummer Doug MacGregor will be subbing in behind the kit for this Friday’s Fake Palms show at the Garrison.

“It’s forced me to have some time to work on the next record,” le Riche shrugs. “The next record’s pretty much written. I kind of just started working on that because right after we recorded, Lane went on tour for a month and a half. I’d just spent all this time working on Record 1 and I had a lot of leftover ideas so I just kind of kept going with it. So it’s a bummer not to be playing as many shows as we’d like — if it was up to me, I’d be doing eight-week tours in the States and Canada — but doing this has, like, forced me to sit down and think of different ways to be a band.”

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